Mediterranean Sea Diaries

Mediterranean Sea Diaries is a research and design project that imagines the future
of spaces like landfills and e-waste lands as a result of
overproduction. These spaces are generated as a cautionary tale of
the Mediterranean coast near future and are based on recent events
around the politics of waste management leading Lebanon to dump its waste in
the Mediterranean Sea.

Valentine in Things City

Valentine in Things City is a research and design project that imagines the future of post-human spaces like Google data centers and Amazon warehouses. Using the same artificial intelligence code that organizes logistics infrastructure, a fictional fulfillment center at the scale of a city has been procedurally generated.Things city is designed to accommodate only delivery drones, logistics bots, and packages as its citizens. Through the eyes of the city’s machines, we watch as a girl enters Things City on Valentine’s day searching for a lost package.

Facade Study

AI Research Project -
Study of the collaborative aspects that can be seen between designers and machine intelligence.

A series of resulting images as part of an ongoing study of the collaborative aspect that can be seen between designers and machine intelligence. This idea of a collaboration has often been explored by feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway; the feminist narrative tends to go against all sorts of hierarchy models and point out that we are part of a cyborg future in which we and the machines live in an extension to each other. Using machine learning as a partner, makes us question how do we make design decisions in the first place. Unlike the professional design tools, or the consumer level ones, machine intelligence lets designers explore a wider search-for-form space, while still having a say on how much of these decisions should be made by us. Selection, and choosing what is involved in making those decisions becomes more important.

Donna Haraway -
'I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.'

'Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.'

Since antiquity, the conception of artificial beings capable of thought have both captivated and terrorized
the imagination. Later, the onset of industrialism would see these anthropomorphic projections begin to
undergo more mechanical geneses - as if the homunculi of alchemy had synthesized with Gottfried
Leibniz’s Calculus ratiocinator and spawned such cautionary and speculative tales as Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix. These tales,
along with countless others, have firmly rooted Artificial Intelligence (AI) into popular culture and the
mythology of the future.

Since its inception as a field of research in 1956, the development of AI and machines that can perform
tasks requiring increasing levels of computational complexity have led to a constant re-evaluation of what
constitutes as “intelligence”. Known as the AI effect, devices that were once considered intelligent
continue to fall out of this classification. Advancements in machine learning in recent years however, have
given us a new definition of AI that is based on a machine’s ability to not only perform tasks, but to
improve performance without human intervention.

The scale and reach of this development is simultaneously impressive and disquieting. Bit by bit, binary
notation permeates ever-more aspects of the everyday, operating between the scale of the atomic and
the planetary. Through predictive searches, targeted advertising, the internet of things, smart homes, selfdriving
cars, city wide surveillance systems, satellite communications and subterranean cable systems, AI
platforms may have bots whose numbers exceed our own - performing tasks made mostly by machines
for machines under the guise of convenience and security. It is a rogue proliferation of monitoring,
recording and processing data carried out in the abyss of cyberspace out of sight and out of mind.

Exposing this activity, re-examining its effects and studying its trajectory requires a re-contextualization
of the platforms and objects containing AI. Through the format of an online encyclopedia, the project
embraces a flat ontology and de-familiarizes preconceived notions about these platforms and objects by
adopting the aesthetic, narrative and descriptive devices of the mystical. The [AI]ncyclopedia is at once a
catalogue, grimoire and commentary apparatus.

Things City

Concept Art -
Series of possible urban scenarios when collapsing machine and human vision of the city.